Free Shadows Before the Sun by Kelly Gay Page B

bite of the stone floor against his cheekbones and the side of his skull. He was naked and cold, chained facedown on the floor, arms straight out, held there by manacles on his wrists, neck, and ankles.
    They wouldn’t let him die. And every time he did, every time his body gave out and his soul departed, their vicious spell would lasso it back, drag it back into his broken body. To endure. He’d seen the fucking light so many times it was making him mad, those glimpses of peace, the feeling it gave him, the brief absence of pain.
    There was pure, soft, welcoming light. And then it would begin to dim, growing smaller and smaller and smaller, until he was surrounded in darkness and screaming to go back. This was a dark, despicable magic; one of the most heinous of spells, tethering a soul to a dying or dead body.
    Returning to his broken body was a torture the like of which he couldn’t comprehend. The shock of it, the utter contrast between peace and pain . . . It was a sensation worse than the grid, worse than the whippings. It was a horror so unique that it fucked with his mind.
    He was losing his hold on reality. He craved his own demise. They were turning him into a madman. His lust for death was only overshadowed by his hunger to kill the Circe, to exact the cruelest, most prolonged, most vulgar kind of end imaginable.
    Over time, as he lay there, his pathetic body would actually try to heal, to knit some of his wounds back together. To give the whip master something else to tear back down. But nothing could repair his psyche, his mind, his tired soul. There was no healing for that. The sane part of him knew it and no longer cared.
    As he went in and out of consciousness, visions of a former life flashed through his mind, of the forest of Gorsedd and the sidhé fae hermit who taught him, of a life that meant something, of a smiling child with big brown eyes, of a woman so fierce and loyal and beautiful that she took his breath away. He’d tried to hold on to those images, tried not to miss a single detail that played through his weary mind.
    But they were all disjointed and random. All part ofa shattered life, one that he’d been stupid, idiotic to believe could ever be his.
    The most painful, intense regret filled him in the lucid moments after those flashes. It burned through him, searing his chest, his heart, his throat. And sometimes it burned so raw and fierce that he couldn’t hold it in and he dug his fingernails into the stone and roared in pain and rage.
    He was no longer siren. He was animal. A crazed thing to be toyed with and tortured and lost. An animal that would ravage its keepers as soon as the slightest opportunity arose. Kill or be killed.
    He laughed again, the sound ragged and thin. He laughed at that because he had been killed. Over and over and over again.
    Red washed across his cloudy vision, and he could almost smell the iron tang, and feel its heat and thickness. Red, all of it red in Circe blood and Malakim vengeance.
    •    •    •
    The highly unpleasant sensation of losing all physical sense and then becoming whole again paled in comparison to opening my eyes and knowing I was there. In Fiallan. In Hank’s city. So close. I’m here, Hank. I squeezed my eyelids closed and forced down the emotion. I was here, and I was damned well going to succeed.
    Trahern’s hand fell from my elbow. He stepped back, bowed to me, and then blinked out. Behind him stood Sandra; Brell was already gone.
    We stood on a large platform, a wall rising behindus and a market spread out in front of us. I could smell the sea and, beyond the murmur of many voices and activity, I thought I heard it, too. The aroma of fresh bread and seafood mingled with the salty air and the faint scent of the stones warmed by the sun. I tipped my head to the sky and let it bathe my skin in warmth. It was easy, after a while, to get used to the darkness back home. The only times I acknowledged how much I missed the light